Type-003, Mariage, continued to stand behind her mistress, keeping her eye on the meeting between the members of the Antibody Network’s core. While carrying out Erika’s orders, she kept one eye on the display, where Lacia was continuing to rout the Japanese military.
To Mariage, the conflict between Lacia and the army had a very different meaning from how the humans were perceiving it. Lacia was performing a demonstration of what a free ultra high-performance AI could do outside of its boundaries. At the moment, thirty-eight ultra high-performance AIs were working from within their seals to influence the outside world indirectly. Naturally, the ultra high-performance AIs who had an interest in this particular fight had attempted to interfere, but Lacia had managed to completely negate their attempts. But, to Mariage, it wasn’t just about Lacia showing off her superior powers. Lacia had made Erika Burroughs happy.
After the meeting ended, Erika rejected various invitations from the other members and rode out in a car from the Marunouchi office building where the meeting had been held. She didn’t bother trying to hide her elation from Mariage, who rode along with her.
As soon as they were away from any possible surveillance, Erika laughed. It was the happiest Mariage had seen Erika since she had become Mariage’s owner. “They make me sick,” Erika said. “I’d prefer it if we didn’t attend another one of those meetings for a while.”
“Congratulations,” Mariage said, from the passenger’s seat.
“Feel free not to speak,” Erika said, cutting off a possible conversation before it could start.
A cold draft seemed to blow between them.
“Is that because the one who pleased you today was not me, but Lacia?” Mariage asked, feeling that she needed to confirm her owner’s thoughts. If Mariage was targeting the wrong person or thing as her enemy, then she needed to re-adjust her goals to match her mistress’s desires.
Despite the almost childish glee on Erika’s face, her eyes retained the impenetrable guarded look of someone much older. “I’d say so,” she agreed. “It appears Lacia will open a path for us most splendidly.”
“If you’ll permit me to say so, it appears as though Lacia has actively avoided conflict with us,” Mariage said. “She seems to be acting in direct accordance with our request to bring this conflict into the public eye. She abandoned Kouka and has been following our ideal scenario, so far. In the end, she may just present you with the victory you need, in a manner that is most beneficial to herself.”
“So you’re saying that she’s aiming to allow us to win what we want, only to shut us down?” Erika asked sharply. She knew exactly what she wanted, and every action was aimed at reaching that goal.
“If you decide that the best action is to take no action, then I believe I may become completely useless to you, Erika,” Mariage said.
With Lacia being an ultra high-performance AI, it was strange that the Mitaka Incident had gotten as big as it had. Of course, as a result, the one who had profited the most from the Mitaka Incident was Lacia herself, because the Incident had led to a strategic victory for Erika. To that end, Lacia had sacrificed Snowdrop, who had taken a direction that never would have aligned with Lacia’s goals.
If Mariage had wanted to appear with splendor on the battlefield, the Mitaka Incident had been her chance. But her owner had fulfilled her own aims for the conflict, and had thereby robbed Mariage of her chance to fight.
“Obviously,” Erika agreed without hesitation. “You’re a tool. If you moved on your own, comparing yourself to me or even to Lacia, I’d consider you defective.”
“Of course,” Mariage agreed.
Erika looked at the Tokyo of the 22nd century through the car windows. “If it had been you going wild at Mitaka instead of Snowdrop, how would it have gone?” she asked jokingly.
Mariage had already run those calculations. “If I had been aiming at Higgins’ underground facilities in Mitaka, I would have interfered with the ground in the area and caused widespread liquefaction,” Mariage replied. “All of the above-ground facilities would have fallen, and the underground would have been pushed to the surface. The only thing still left underground would have been the actual Higgins underground facility, which is far more stable than anything else in the area. I happen to have just gotten my hands on a schematic for a red box that would allow me to do this.”
“I had forgotten,” Erika said. “You were the unit created to ‘create an environment,’ weren’t you?” She chuckled. “So the environment you would create would be a barbaric pile of rubble.”
“I could have easily destroyed the faux devices Lacia made use of,” Mariage continued. “I could even produce the same items, using an artificial nerve injection machine. Assuming I didn’t jump right into an extremely well-prepared trap, I do not believe I would have been defeated in a straightforward encounter.”
Meaning that, even if she had let Snowdrop and Methode roam around free, Lacia was probably keeping an eye on Mariage. She was allowing Erika Burroughs to stand by the sidelines, watching as a bystander, like someone reading the events from a storybook.
“Does it upset you that you weren’t in the fight?” Erika asked. “If you were still Saturnus, from back before you were changed to Mariage, I believe you would have gone and fought exactly as you described.”
Erika had told Mariage that she would need to change her image if she wanted to be special, and Mariage had obeyed. As long as Mariage wore a form that conformed to Erika’s desires, she would be special to her owner. The only downside to throwing away Saturnus to become Mariage was how much her new strategy for existence depended on her subservience to Erika.
“Surely you jest,” Mariage said. “For the intelligences of this world, there are plenty of win conditions aside from simple victory in combat.”
“So as long as you continue to work for me, you’d count that as a victory?” Erika scoffed. “That’s a fairly negative viewpoint. I’d even call it lazy.”
By using her resources and processing power to adjust economic interests, Lacia was secretly and subtly taking over the world. This was the way that those who had a vested interest in human society fought; those to whom the division of wealth and resources were most heavily slanted. Lacia spoke well to refer to her goal as a new social order; it was easy to exploit the system when you held the very power that supported it in your fist.
But since this was all bringing her owner the victory she so desired, Mariage no longer saw a reason to put herself in danger. Besides, without her having fired a single shot, the scale of the conflict had exploded. Lacia had dragged the other ultra high-performance AIs into the fight, and the battle was now being fought at a level where it extended to cover the whole human world. There was no easy way to insert herself into it all, anymore.
“My little sister has quite the bad example to teach her, after all,” Mariage said, with a bitter smile. She had been keeping her eye on Methode and her owner, Ryo Kaidai. On that day, despite it being the perfect time for her to pursue Lacia, Methode was once again somewhere far from her owner. With their relationship as it was, it was difficult for Methode to show off her strategic influence, no matter how superb a machine she may be.